


that their loss is no disaster

by chainofclovers



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, references to past in-canon violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:54:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: It’s safer to stay away, Eve texts Niko, and God, she should print that phrase on a t-shirt and wear it to shreds, send it in a mass email with none of the addresses on BCC, have it tattooed it across her clavicle so even a stranger in the supermarket has fair warning.





	that their loss is no disaster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [impertinence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinence/gifts).



> impertinence, I was delighted for the opportunity to participate in this exchange for the first time and to fulfill a prompt in a fandom for which I've never written before. I *loved* the first season of _Killing Eve_ , so I was intimidated but eager to explore these characters in a new way. I hope you enjoy the story!
> 
> The title comes from "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, which is, ahem, my favorite villanelle.
> 
> Many thanks to bristler for a fabulous beta and a healthy dose of moral support. <333

_I wonder what's on your mind_  
_I wonder what's on your mind_  
_Look around and see_  
_What it does to me_  
_I wonder what's on your mind_

_I think I'll throw it all away_  
_I think I'll throw it all away_  
_And if dreams come back to me_  
_I'll pretend that I don't see_  
_I'll just cover my eyes instead_

— Yo La Tengo, “The Ballad of Red Buckets”

 

 _It’s safer to stay away_ , Eve texts Niko, and God, she should print that phrase on a t-shirt and wear it to shreds, send it in a mass email with none of the addresses on BCC, have it tattooed it across her clavicle so even a stranger in the supermarket has fair warning. 

It isn’t until later, sitting at her gate at Charles de Gaulle, that Eve notices—again, always—what an asshole she is. She checks her phone for the thousandth time, and while Niko hasn’t responded, at least she can see he’s finally read the message. And when she rereads, knowing he’s seen it, she realizes the problem: she might as well have said “leave me alone,” except she’s the one who’s gone. To her credit, since leaving for Russia she's left multiple voicemails asking after Niko’s well-being, but now she sounds concerned with only herself. Eve’s safety is pretty far down the list of her own priorities, and yet it’s the only excuse she’s given for not returning home. Eve meant, or wanted to mean, that it was safer for Niko to let her keep her distance. Safer for anyone to make that same choice.

The flight from Paris to Berlin takes almost no time at all; after Oksana slipped away, practically out from under her, Eve spent longer planning a destination than she spends in the air. Her seatmate sleeps the whole flight, arms folded against her chest. As they land Eve peers past her and stares out the window. She’s seen this exact view before; when she and Bill flew to Berlin together, more recently than seems possible now, they sat on the same side of the plane. She’s chosen Berlin because if Bill were alive, he’d listen to her confusion and find a way to laugh. For so long, Bill was the antidote to life going wrong, and if she can’t see him, she wants to spend time with the circumstances of his absence. The impact of the familiar view—similar weather, similar angles, similar monochromatic sunlight—lands in her stomach like sludge, churns so profoundly that she would cry if she weren’t so exhausted.

She uses her credit card to prepay for a week at one of the shabbier hotels in the gentrifying neighborhood Prenzlauer Berg. When she’s checked in, she forces herself to drop off her bags and stagger out for provisions. There’s no fridge in her room, so she brings back müsli and Chipsfrisch and red wine. It’s barely 7 p.m. when she walks through the door, but she falls asleep without opening anything, doesn’t wake up until morning. 

For days, Berlin feels like nothing. Nothing touches her, nothing matters, not even the history she’s supposed to mourn. When she confronted Oksana in Paris, she rattled off a list of what she’d lost. But with the exception of her proximal, Berlin-heightened grief for Bill, the losses are shallow, distant. She feels briefly guilty about leaving Elena in the lurch, especially after she provided such an exceptional lead. Elena’s probably jobless too, probably stuck packing up the office with Kenny. But it’s better not to contact her. Less risky. Much better to leave it up to Kenny to supply Elena with insufficient, inarticulate answers to her many questions.

The fact is, guilt just isn’t interesting enough to hold her attention. Nothing about Eve’s immediate surroundings hold her focus for more than a few seconds, either. After Paris, she’s unfinished. She’s mid-sentence, and it hurts. Her afternoon with Oksana—less than thirty minutes alone in the apartment together, and she'd convince herself it never happened if she could think of anything else—eats at the edges of her body. She wants to know where Oksana is. She misses Bill. She wants to see Oksana again. She wants to talk to Bill, wants to tell him what it felt like when she pushed the knife into Oksana’s stomach. These unfair desires are all she has left, the only thing that distinguishes her from anyone else.

For a week, no one invades her space. No one makes her feel endangered. The door to her hotel room locks automatically, but she wishes it didn’t, because she’s unlocked, untended, tethered only to the desperate belief that something else is supposed to happen. She doesn’t charge her phone, and it dies halfway through the second day. She takes late-afternoon naps that don’t end until it’s dark outside, and they fuck her up each time, make her angry and frightened until she’s awake enough to remember where she is. When hunger comes, she eats chips or chokes down dry müsli. Every night she keeps the TV on low and drinks glass after glass of wine. She loves to drink wine, loves it, loves it, loves it, and in her real life she almost never feels that she’s had enough to drink. She’s usually busy enough that she doesn’t spend much time thinking about it, but it’s always true that she only feels like she’s had enough when she knows she’ll be hungover the next day but is too drunk to care; when she stops drinking before that point, and in her real life she typically does, it’s with a purely intellectual restraint. A learned behavior. Here in Berlin, she’s hungover every morning. 

The first seven days leave her grease-cocooned and woozy. She lies in bed on the morning she’s meant to check out of the hotel, charges her phone long enough to Google search _how long does it take to heal from a stab wound_ and _stomach stab wound recovery_. It’s possible Oksana’s mobile by now, possible she’s been able to heal without surgery. Eve takes a shower, twists her wet hair into a tight bun, and walks downstairs to book a few more days on her sad credit card. The card’s diminishing available credit is a problem for some vague, pathetic future-Eve, a woman she has no way of knowing and can’t bring herself to care about. 

After she extends her stay, she walks through the lobby doors and strikes out farther than the Späti around the corner, starts to look around. She heads to the U-Bahn station, rides trains for hours, scans every passenger for Oksana’s face. She’s awake for the transition from day to night, orders a full meal in a restaurant and picks at it until it’s late enough to think about going out for the evening. She goes back to the hotel to put on her last clean clothes, then heads back into the city to queue up at the club where Bill was killed. The club where Oksana killed Bill. Stabbed Bill. Sliced through layers and layers of clothes, skin, muscle—but she can’t think that deep. Eve has spent hours researching murder, has thought carefully about what different types of weapons do to human organs, but when she thinks about Bill’s death, she can’t think past his skin, past the repetitive thrusts it took to bring him down. She only stabbed Oksana once.

When she’s finally inside, the club isn’t very crowded, so she nurses her first glass of wine of the day at one of the neon-lit bars. Once the dance floor is packed with people, she pays for the drink and walks into the crowd, lets the bodies press against her like a school of fish, tries to mistake the thrum of bass for a heartbeat. The lights flashed blue last time she was here, when she couldn’t get to Bill fast enough, couldn’t manage to save him. Tonight everything glows green and pink, the sick neon of having fun, of making a carefree night mean something. 

Until now, being back in Berlin has been like sinking into a wound. The skin wants to close, and she’s still inside. She could end here, never speak to anyone again, never again joke and bicker her way through the interactions that make up life. The skin would heal eventually, and she’d drown in the blood beneath. But the crowd rubs the wound open again, exposes it to fresh air. She’s worked her way far back into the club, and when her skin starts to hurt the way she wants—when she has remembered Bill with as much intensity as she can—she starts to walk toward one of the exits. It takes a long time to trudge back through the club, not minding the shoulders and arms shoved against her body, not minding the feet that stomp hers. The crowd is a wave, perfect in its indiscriminate movement. The crowd helps her without knowing her or caring who she is. Then she feels a pinprick in her spine. This feeling, an arrow-sharp thrill, is familiar but new tonight. It’s the sensation of being in someone’s sightlines. 

Eve wants to look back over her shoulder, but she doesn’t. The sensation will last or it won’t, and she tells herself that if it lasts, that’s all the proof she needs that she’s been found. When she’s back on the street walking toward the U-Bahn, the presence doesn’t leave her, and if fear can be a relief, that’s what she feels. She walks slowly, wants to make things easy. Yes, she’s being followed, but this isn’t cat-and-mouse, an impressive pursuit. She went to an obvious place, made herself sluggish and slow. She’s hardly spoken to anyone in a week, has felt as sick over Bill as she ought to be. He made mistakes a rookie would think twice about. He wanted to be the cat. The least she can do is walk slowly now, let someone find her. After so much silence, Eve’s mouth is full: air, heat, the possibility she and Oksana opened in Paris that has become, somehow, something she needs to live. This is her only remaining option, and there’s something almost healthy about making it down to one last choice. She’s still mid-sentence, but she’ll see it through to the end.

She has to wait a few minutes for the train. Standing on the platform, she can’t detect anyone familiar in her periphery, but when she walks onto the train car, grabs a bright yellow rail for stability, and finally takes a moment to glance around, Oksana joins her, grabs a rail not two meters away. Eve has referred to Oksana by her real name for weeks, has used it in a foolhardy attempt to impress, intimidate, show credibility: _I know her_ , she means, or _I know you_. But when she sees Oksana now, wide grin spread across her partially-healed face, her eyes a little wet with pride or excitement, for an entire second or two Eve can think only of the name Villanelle. 

They don’t speak. Eve gets off at her stop, and Oksana follows, closer this time. At the lobby door, Eve stops walking, lets Oksana catch up so they can enter together, rattle their bones in the ancient lift, walk slowly down the hall to Eve’s fourth-floor room.

“Hideous room,” Oksana remarks.

“Thanks,” Eve says archly, and immediately feels like an idiot. “Um.” 

Oksana wears a loose, pale pink sweater, tight black jeans, chunky black boots. She shrugs fetchingly, and the neckline of the sweater dances against her shoulders. She walks to the edge of Eve’s bed, which is neatly made for the first time in a week because Eve’s finally left the room long enough for the maid to come in and change the sheets. It takes Oksana a beat too long to sit down, and Eve has to ask. “Are you okay? Is it healing?”

“Mm,” says Oksana. “Once I was stable, I found a doctor to treat me here. Because you were here. It took five minutes to figure that out.” She rolls her eyes. “Wait.” With a hand on either side of her hips, she pushes off from the bed and walks to the corner of the room. She sets a handgun on the scuffed little desk. Eve can’t muster any interest in the weapon. She only feels the way she’s often felt—resentful that Oksana always has the things she needs with her, like an invisible layer of accessories she can pull from thin air. Her profile’s always sleek, and she never seems to have to carry a purse; even when Eve had only a desk job, her purse weighed a ton.

“Let me see,” Eve says.

Oksana lowers herself back onto the bed, lies down on top of the covers. “Are you going to kill me?” she asks. The words are confident, unbothered. A joke. 

There’s a plastic spoon lying on the dresser. Eve nabbed it from the Späti before it occurred to her that dry müsli is a finger food. She holds it up, smiles at another human being for the first time in what feels like a year. “This is all I’ve got.”

Oksana pats the bedspread next to her. “C’mere, killer.” 

Eve sits down, tries in vain to keep her hands from shaking. She lets her legs dangle off the side of the bed, kicks her shoes onto the floor. Oksana lifts the hem of her own sweater, reveals a large white bandage taped to the skin. It’s clean and tidy, covers the wound entirely. Eve doesn’t know why she’d expected to see blood, expected something angry and dirty and red. 

“I’m in Berlin for a little while,” Oksana says. She turns slowly onto her side, orients her body so it seems focused on Eve. She lifts her chin barely a centimeter, and just like that, Eve stretches out beside her, tries to find her eyes.

Last time, Eve said “I’ve never done anything like this before” to be coy, to buy time. She liked the double meaning: never fucked a woman, never stabbed a woman. But underneath the cleverness, she liked the truth of it. For an instant, before the handle of the knife started to burn in her hand, those words made her feel something. She felt—not like an impostor, not out of her element, but like someone new. 

“You’ll have to do everything,” Oksana says. She brings a hand to her bandage, takes it away almost as quickly, folds both of her arms to fit in the empty space between them.

Eve wants to say something about presumptuousness, but she comes up blank. “I—”

Oksana cocks her eyebrow. “I told you before, how I masturbate about you a lot.” It’s not new information, but it’s matter-of-fact enough to make Eve flinch. Oksana grins, lazy and knowing. “I did all that work,” she says. “Your turn to show me something.”

“Do you—do you want me to touch you?” Is that what Eve hopes for? For Oksana to say she wants Eve’s hands on her, or that she wants her mouth? 

Oksana smiles, cranes her neck so her head luxuriates against the pillow. Eve has to prop herself up on her elbows to be able to see her face. She’d always thought joy couldn’t reach a psychopath’s eyes, thought psychopaths did everything with their hands and mouths, were dead in the ways normal people were alive. But Oksana’s eyes glittered on the train, and they shine here, too, with interest and anticipation if not with the warm joy Eve wants to feel. Oksana stretches out a hand. “Fuck yourself with this,” she says and wriggles her fingers. “But don’t jostle me.” She laughs, a brief sharp bark. “I’m very delicate.”

“What?” But no matter how shocked Eve sounds, she’ll do it. She’ll do whatever Oksana wants. She’s paid in grief, she’s spilled some blood, she’s lost—not everything, but close enough. There’s a logistical challenge ahead of her, but she can twist this into something interesting. It doesn’t matter if it’s good; Oksana wants to touch her, or that’s one interpretation, and that’s good already. “Okay,” Eve says, addressing herself more than anything. It seems a bit abrupt, but she starts to undo the buttons on her grey trousers.

Oksana grunts in frustration. “Not yet,” she says, as if Eve is stupid, but cute for being such an idiot. 

Eve laughs, and it releases a fraction of the tension. “Oh, should I kiss you first?”

“I don’t need to kiss. But sure.”

The cuts and bruises on Oksana’s face have faded considerably in the past week, but they’re still noticeable. Even up close, it’s like she’s smeared sticky strawberry jam all over herself and refuses to wash it off. It’s adorable and ugly and obnoxious. Eve would like to fly at Oksana’s face, jostle her entire body, but she’s spent days in this bed, a drunk potato chip, and now she’s tired and weak. She scoots closer gradually, bouncing the bed with every motion. It must hurt, but Oksana doesn’t wince. 

Eve wants the kiss to cause Oksana pain, but she wants to make her to gasp in delight too, or grab her arm, or sigh. She bites at Oksana’s lips, presses her lips hard against the cuts on the side of her face, forgets to feel her own feelings. Nothing happens inside her until she breaks the kiss, pulls back far enough to focus on Oksana’s face. “I thought about you alone in bed,” Oksana says. “With your hair down." She frowns at Eve's bun. "I always think of you alone.”

“Why?”

“I never think of us together. But I think about you all the time. You in your room, in the dark, touching yourself, and even though it’s pitch black, I can see you through the window. And you never get enough, but you always try.” 

“Do I see you?” Eve asks. The question plants arousal in her stomach, like a capsule ready to dissolve in water, a chemical reaction waiting to happen.

“Don’t you always?”

Eve nods. 

“You ready?” Oksana asks. 

They’ve barely spent any time together, but the answer is yes. Eve nods again. 

“Good.” She gives Eve her hand, and Eve reaches between them to take it. Her fingers are strong and small, the palm muscular in a way Eve’s own hands aren’t. She squeezes the hand, lets go so she can start to undress. She leaves her shirt on, shimmies out of her trousers and underwear. Despair flutters inside her, taking up almost as much space as her desire, because she’s as good as alone right now. She finds Oksana’s hand again, brings it between her legs. “You’re wet,” Oksana says in the same voice she might use to say “good job” if Eve had ever done a good job in her life or “I like your shirt” if Eve had any shirts she liked. Oksana has told her to do everything, but her fingers curl against Eve of their own accord, and Eve hears her hum in satisfaction. Eve starts to move her hips, grabs Oksana’s wrist, holds on tighter and tighter. “Put me inside you,” Oksana instructs, and Eve breathes in and out until she can comply. The movement stretches Oksana’s arm a little, but her body remains still.

It’s not enough. Eve is going to come, and it won’t last. She can almost believe Oksana’s fingers are anchoring her to herself like no one’s tried to do in a very long time, but Oksana’s not trying either. After Eve comes she’ll still want to find Villanelle. Will still feel the need to look. For a moment Eve flies above the room, sees the gun on the desk, sees her body and Oksana’s body. They look beautiful together. She wants her more than she’s wanted anyone. At this angle she should really focus on Oksana, take this opportunity to learn, but as she zooms back in, she watches herself. She’s stranded: wild for the electricity she’s pulling into her own skin, but even wilder for something just beyond it, something she won’t find here. 

With every plunge of Oksana’s fingers, she imagines Oksana looking for her and finding only a body. The orgasm is right here, millimeters away. It will happen before they can find each other, and they won’t find each other when it fades, and maybe they never will.


End file.
